UNITED NATIONS, Oct 16: The United Nations Security Council and top UN officials are expected to meet this week to begin planning a framework for a future transition government in Kabul and a UN peace keeping mission in Afghanistan, UN officials said here.

The two United Nations envoys who are dealing with various aspects of the situation in Afghanistan have arrived in New York for high-level meetings.

Secretary-General’s special representative for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, and his personal envoy for Afghanistan Fransec Vendrell are expected to meet with the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan on Tuesday afternoon.

Mr Brahimi has already met with Secretary-General Annan on Monday. Later the two are expected to meet with the 15-member UN Security Council to brief it on the latest developments and to begin work on the future framework, diplomats here said.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Monday the United Nations will be a key player in the transition from Taliban rule.

“Clearly the United Nations will be playing a leading role. No one government will be able to handle it,” he said, adding that the best hope for future stability is a broad-based government.

But exactly “what Afghanistan might look like politically, economically diplomatically after the military phase ... is very much work in progress,” US ambassador to the UN John Negroponte said on Monday.

He said “everyone is looking to the leadership” of Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s special representative for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, an expert on the war-ravaged central Asian nation.

US President George W. Bush is likely to elaborate on his “nation-building” vision when he addresses the rescheduled General Assembly ministerial debate at its opening on Nov 10.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s ex-king Zahir Shah asked the United Nations to prepare to quickly dispatch an international peacekeeping force to Afghanistan in case its ruling Taliban collapse under US military strikes.

The former king, who has lived in exile in Rome since he was overthrown in 1973, warned UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that a sudden Taliban collapse would create a power vacuum in the Afghan capital of Kabul that could prove “costly in human lives” as various opposition forces vied for control.

He urged Annan, in an Oct 10 letter, to bring the matter to the attention of the Security Council, which dispatches peacekeeping missions, so that peacekeepers could be rapidly deployed “in the face of further deterioration of an already abominable situation in Afghanistan.”

“I hope that this appeal will receive the urgent consideration that it deserves,” the former king wrote. Annan forwarded the letter to Ambassador Richard Ryan of Ireland, this month’s Security Council president.

The 87-year-old Zahir Shah, who is a member of Afghanistan’s biggest ethnic group, the Pashtun, has offered to play a role in trying to unite Afghanistan’s disparate ethnic groups after two decades of war.

The ex-king was in Rome on Monday to discuss the future political shape of Afghanistan with the foreign ministers of Italy and France. He also sent a three-member delegation to Pakistan.